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After Being Refused SRS Letter

TG Kills Therapist, Self

By Cindy Martin
Transgender Forum Publisher
San Diego, CA
June 10, 1998

See Sallyanne Offner's related story on Therapist-Bashing

A San Diego transsexual, apparently frustrated and obsessed with plans to have a sex change, shot and killed a therapist who refused to give her a crucial document and then turned the gun on herself in a mid-town medical office building.

Police said that Julia Kate Morgan, 26, was angry that Rita Powers, 41, had refused her a letter of recommendation to complete her transition and have SRS. But friends said that Morgan, though upset at Powers, probably had intended to commit suicide that day, not shoot the therapist.

"She knew that she was going to get turned down,'' said Susan Longworth, who knew both Powers and Morgan. "We saw her just before she went to counseling that day and we're almost totally positive she intended to kill herself and was not out to harm anyone else.''

Longworth said that eyewitness accounts of the incidents indicated that the therapist may have tried to stop Morgan from taking her own life and this may have caused Morgan to "snap".

Powers, who was very inexperienced with transsexuals, was said to have a highly confrontational style with patients, a style that deeply rankled Morgan, who was "obsessing on her letter" in recent months, according to people who knew both Morgan and Powers.

"We may never know the full story, but to those of us who knew Julia, it was apparent that she had simply reached the end of her rope and had lost all hope of ever being able to complete her transition to becoming a post-operative male-to-female woman,'' according to a statement by Longworth and her partner, Cathryn Curtis.

Morgan was definitely a person in a hurry to have SRS and in the "very last few months began to obsess about the letter from the therapist,"Curtis said. "Julia was a perfectionist and had set up this very rigid schedule for when she would have her surgery. Time was running out on the schedule and she thought Rita was standing in the way."

Curtis and Longworth painted a picture of Morgan as troubled person, who had a very difficult past and was socially isolated, but fiercely independent:

A Troubled Life

"As a child, Julia was abandoned by her mother and became a ward to the state, spending many terrible and lonely years in the foster care system. These experiences toughened her dramatically from the small happy child she had been and by the time she was of age she felt mean enough to join the military. She served four years in the Navy, and the only good thing she attributed to that experience was that it brought her to San Diego. Upon her discharge, she landed a job at the Naval Hospital as a medical records clerk. She did well with her job and spent almost six years there, though admitedly she had trouble in relating to people on the job. She was always pleasant, and many of her co-workers enjoyed her company, but she was inexperienced in dealing with her feelings, in dealing with inter-personal relationships, and she couldn't ever really develope more than just passing relationships with anyone, even the most intimate of relationships."

"Miss Morgan had known from early in her young life that she was different from other boys her age, and at some point in adulthood she discovered what a Transsexual is and self-identified with the concept. She was certain for most of her young life that she was really female and in the last year and a half she was taking certain and positive steps to do something about correcting her birth-defect and becoming the woman she knew was within her. This was when she came into our lives."

"Some 6 months ago I referred her to Ms Rita Powers, M.A., an intern working off her required hours prior to receiving her license to practice on her own. They had been seeing each other frequently over that six month period, but increasingly Julia was reporting tension between them and her own frustration with the "system" (the Harry Benjamin Standards of Care) and the way she, an intelligent, capable and accomplished adult, was subjugated to a 2nd class position and that her life was rested from her control and placed into the hands of another who may not have had her own interests at heart. She, over time, became more and more confrontational with Rita, more demanding of an answer..."when can I get my surgery letter?", an answer that apparently was not forthcoming."

Therapist Had Confrontational Style

I had known Rita for quite some time, as she had previously been my counselor and had written my 2nd of the two required approval letters for surgery. She had been challenging to me, playing a game of cat-and-mouse with my letter. She liked to use a therapy manner that was threatening to the client, stressful to the extreme, as it exposed the patient's ability to cope with and handle stress and she believed that to be a prime requisite for approval to the surgery procedure and to the high-stress life that could lie beyond it. She wanted assurance that the person in question would be able to handle the stress' that life would bring once they had taken the final step, as there was no-way to take a step back once they had passed a certain point, the surgery.

This time, she failed to read the stress level of her client and pushed just a little too hard. Something snapped.

See Sallyanne Offner's related story on Therapist-Bashing

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